“Rip Van Winkle” (1819)

Washington Irving

Washington Irving (1783-1859)

last of 11 children

lived from end of Revolutionary War to just before the Civil War

1809: published parody History of New York, under the pseudonym Dietrich Knickerbocker; became celebrity (New York Knicks NBA team)

1815: departed for Europe; away for 17 yrs.

1819: The Sketch Book, including “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” both based on German folktales

Washington Irving (1783-1859)

first American writer to be a big success in England

1828: The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, research in Spain

1829-32: diplomat in London

1832-42: returns to U.S., builds home Sunnyside on Hudson River, New York

1842-46: minister to Spain

1851-59: 5 vol. life of George Washington

Sunnyside

Hudson River from Sunnyside

Vision vs. Reality (1)

“Rip Van Winkle” is the classic American

story of a man who finds his home life

intolerable, and so escapes into a world of

fantasy and vision

Even before Rip goes into the mountains and

apparently falls asleep for 20 yrs., the story is

divided between reality and fantasy/vision

Vision vs. Reality (2)

Reality: Home life, under the rule of Dame Van Winkle

Farm: “most pestilent piece of ground in the whole country” (¶8)

Children: “ragged and wild as if they belonged to nobody” (¶9)

Wife: “continually dinning in his ears about his idleness, his carelessness, and the ruin he was bringing on his family” (¶10)

Vision vs. Reality (3)

Vision: Community anywhere outside the house

Playing with village children/telling stories (¶6)

Minding “any body’s business but his own”; “an insuperable

aversion to all kinds of profitable labour” (¶7)

“frequenting a kind of perpetual club of the sages,

philosophers, and other idle personages of the village” (¶12)

Escaping into the woods with gun and dog Wolf (¶15)

Vision vs. Reality: Rip’s Journey

Rip’s Kaatskill experience extends his village

“vision”

Escape from family responsibility

Dutch Drinking party: Male community, from past

(Henry Hudson and men?)

Minding other people’s business (¶19)

Obedience and rebellion: 2 sides of Rip’s

character (¶23)

Political Allegory (1)

Upon waking, Rip finds himself in a different political system

Village inn Union Hotel (¶32)

King George George Washington (¶32)

People: “phlegm and drowsy tranquillity” “busy, bustling, disputatious tone” (¶33)

“ancient newspaper” handbills (¶33)

Nicholas Vedder dead; Brom Dutcher killed in war; Derrick Van Bummel in Congress

Political Allegory (2)

“a knowing, self-important old gentleman”

(¶34): a new political type

Interviews Rip

Leaves when crowd wants to take Rip’s gun (¶47)

Returns “when the alarm was over” (¶56)

The crowd imitates his gestures

Political Allegory (3)

When Rip sees his son, “a precise

counterpart of himself as he went up the

mountain: apparently as lazy, and certainly

as ragged. The poor fellow was now

completely confounded. He doubted his own

identity” (¶45)

This scene portrayed by genre painter John

Quidor, The Return of Rip Van Winkle (1829?

1849?)

Political Allegory (4)

Rip stands for America’s identity crisis as a

new democracy:

“God knows. . . . I’m not myself—I’m

somebody else—that’s me yonder—no that’s

somebody else, got into my shoes—I was

myself last night, but I fell asleep on the

mountain, and they’ve changed my gun, and

ever thing’s changed, and I’m changed, and I

can’t tell what’s my name, or who I am!” (¶46)

Political Allegory (5)

According to this allegorical reading, his wife

stands for England: “there was one species

of despotism under which he had long

groaned, and that was—petticoat

government” –“the tyranny of Dame Van

Winkle (¶60)

Question: How do you respond to this notion

of freedom as freedom from female

domination?

Political Allegory (6)

But “Rip, in fact, was no politician; the

changes of states and empires made but little

impression on him” (¶60)

Thus, Rip is an anti-hero of the revolution, an anti-

patriot, for whom politics makes little difference in

daily life

Rip becomes a patriarch and “a chronicle of old

times”—suggesting a society’s need for memory

as well as revolution

Thomas Cole, View of the Round-Top in the

Catskill Mountains (1827)

Thomas Cole, Sunset in the Catskills (1841)

Landscape as Symbol (1)

Change: (¶3): “Every change of season,

every change of weather, indeed, every hour

of the day, produces some change in the

magical hues and shapes. . .”

Memory: (¶3): “Whoever has made a voyage

up the Hudson must remember the Kaatskill

mountains”

Royalty: (¶3): “glow and light up like a crown

of glory”

Thomas Cole, The Clove, Catskills (c. 1827)

Jasper Francis Cropsey, Autumn - On the Hudson

River (1860)

Landscape as Symbol (2)

Beauty (¶16): “the lordly Hudson, far, far

below him, moving on its silent but majestic

course”

Sublimity/Terror (¶17): “a deep mountain glen,

wild, lonely, and shagged, the bottom filled

with fragments from the impending cliffs”

(association with Dame Van Winkle)

Thomas Cole, The Oxbow (1836)

Landscape as Symbol (3)

Rip cut off from world of vision, re-enters

changed reality:

(¶24): “he found himself on the green knoll

whence he had first seen the old man of the

glen. . . . [T]he eagle was wheeling aloft, and

breasting the pure mountain breeze”

(¶27): “but no traces of such opening remained.

The rocks presented a high impenetrable wall

over which the torrent came tumbling in a sheet of

feathery foam”

Landscape as Symbol (4)

Landscape suggests reality/permanence (as

well as change) (¶29) : “Surely this was his

native village, which he had left but the day

before. There stood the Kaatskill

mountains—there ran the silver Hudson at a

distance—there was every hill and dale

precisely as it had always been”

Conclusion: What is “Rip Van Winkle”

about?

Tradition and change

American identity (German narrative

transplanted to America)

The power of myth

The power of nature

Gendered dimension of American

imagination

Domestic life vs. public life